Tag Archives: Drug Enforcement Administration

DEA quotas called into question

DEA

WASHINGTON — The embattled Drug Enforcement Administration came under fire Tuesday as senators dug into the agency’s controlled substances quota program, questioning whether it contributes to shortages of certain medications.

A Government Accountability Office report stops short of explicitly linking DEA mismanagement to the shortages, but that caution has not stopped some on Capitol Hill from assigning blame.

The DEA, long criticized for internal dysfunction by the GAO and some lawmakers, is still reeling from a sex scandal involving several agents. A Justice Department report in March alleged that DEA officers in Colombia attended parties with prostitutes paid for with drug cartel money.

The charges have not improved the agency’s stock in Congress, where members of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control grilled the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi, a 28-year veteran of the agency who serves as deputy assistant administrator for drug diversion.

“DEA refused to comply with GAO’s requests for information from a particular DEA database for over a year,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the caucus’s chairman as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I had to get personally involved in the process to make sure GAO had the information it needed,” Grassley said.

Some caucus members worried that DEA delays in processing supplier applications and setting quotas have contributed to the problem.

Between January 2001 and June 2013, 168 drug shortages —instances where needed drugs were unavailable to patients— were reported, according to the GAO, an investigative arm of Congress. Many were controlled prescription medications, including pain relievers, anxiolytics and stimulants.

Rannazzisi and Capt. Valerie Jensen, associate director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortages program, insisted that drug manufacturers bear most of the responsibility.

“Shortages are usually preceded by a production disruption,” Jensen said, referring to the quality control issues that sometimes force drug companies to recall certain medications.

GAO Health Care Team Director Marcia Crosse however, painted a different picture. According to Crosse, the GAO’s ultimate inability to establish a relationship between shortages and quotas stems from inaccurate and incomplete data provided by the DEA.

“[DEA] did not have performance measures related to setting quotas or insuring an adequate and uninterrupted supply of controlled substances,” Crosse said.

The shortages issue has come to light at a time when the DEA is facing criticism on multiple fronts. Liberal activists have faulted the agency for holding fast to marijuana scheduling regulations that they say are outdated. Attempted collaborations with and investigations by other government agencies, like the FDA and GAO, routinely expose an agency where dysfunction and secrecy are the norm, some lawmakers say.

One of the most damning indictments however, has come from the DEA’s detention of UC San Diego student Daniel Chung.

In 2012, Chung was arrested by DEA agents after going over a friend’s house to smoke marijuana. Despite promises that he would be processed and released, Chung was left in a holding cell for five days without food or water with his hands cuffed behind his back. When he was discovered, Chung was suffering from dehydration and kidney failure. He was later paid a $4.1 million settlement.

Sen. Grassley, asked Rannazzisi why Grassley had not received an answer from the DEA after sending a letter asking about Chung’s ordeal.

“It’s been eight months and I still don’t have a response,” said Grassley. “There’s no ongoing investigation to hide behind now.”

Rannazzisi said that he could not guarantee a response before the end of the month.

Referring specifically to the Chung case, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that the reputation of the DEA has taken a huge blow.

“I hope this is not the DEA of today, because if it is, you won’t have any support up here,” Feinstein said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he had reached the point “where it’s starting to look to me like DEA is an agency that cannot manage administrative and regulatory responsibilities, and maybe they should be moved elsewhere and it should just purely become an investigative agency with no more administrative responsibilities.”

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Buying marijuana could mean funding cartel killers

WASHINGTON–Since the 1960s, recreational marijuana use has been a rite of passage for millions of American teens and college students. But even the most casual user risks damaging his health and staining his legal record.

Now add to that another risk: fueling the “narco wars” in Mexico that have pitted government troops against powerful drug traffickers. At least 22,700 have died in drug-war-related violence in Mexico since 2007, by some estimates. That’s more than eight times the number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001.

“America’s love affair with illegal drugs fuels the major Mexican drug cartels,” former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration Robert C. Bonner said. “[It] allows them to be powerful, corrupt, and to engage in a lot of violence and intimidation in Mexico and elsewhere.” Bonner has also served as a federal judge and Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Marijuana is often viewed as the most innocuous of illicit substances, and it is the most commonly used illegal drug in the United States. But it is hardly innocent. Many Americans think of cocaine and heroine when they think of the drug wars in Mexico, but by some estimates, marijuana is the most significant source of revenue for the cartels.

“Marijuana represents a good portion of the cash flow of the Mexican cartels, and it represents the most key drug on the southwest border by huge amounts,” Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne said. “I don’t think people realize that when they increased the demand for marijuana in the United States, oftentimes they directly benefit drug trafficking and the violent cartels in Mexico.”

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron says that “prohibition pushes the market underground … [resulting in] ancillary negatives,” like the violence and corruption along the border.

Miron points out that not all marijuana in the U.S. is trafficked from Mexico; some is raised domestically. But because of a lack of any product regulation, it is often impossible to know from where – and from whom – a given amount of marijuana comes. Many users inevitably, if unwittingly, help fund the drug wars that haunt the United States’ southern neighbor.

In a July 2010 prepared congressional testimony for a House hearing on international counternarcotics strategy, Adam Isacson, senior policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America reported: “Decreased violence in Colombia has been offset by a sharp rise in drug-related homicides in Mexico. Today, Mexico is the center of gravity for groups involved in illegal drug transshipment, which is by far the most profitable link in the drug trafficking chain.”

The tactics and levels of organization of the Mexican cartels also have changed. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that “Violence reached acute levels [in Mexico] in 2006 and has only worsened since then; decapitations became common and cartels began disseminating videos documenting gruesome deaths – ‘narco messages’ – to threaten rival cartels and government officials. While initially the majority of violence was between cartel members, in the past two years, police officers, journalists, and politicians have become frequent targets of drug killings. In May 2008, for instance, Mexico’s acting federal police chief was killed in a drug hit.”

The reports of death and conflict continue. A pregnant American consulate worker and her husband were killed in broad daylight in March of this year, in the violence-ridden border town of Ciudad Juarez. And on July 22, Mexican officials received a tip that led them to several mass graves in the northern part of the country. At least 50 bodies were buried there.

Drug-related conflict could also be creeping over into the United States. The Maricopa County attorney’s office in Phoenix told the New York Times that it received 241 reports of border-related kidnappings or hostage-takings in 2008, compared with just 48 in 2004.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the enormous toll the drug wars have taken south of the Arizona border.

“The Mexican drug cartels pose a national security threat to Mexico in the same way that, at one time, the Colombian drug cartels threatened the Colombian state,” Bonner said.

That, in turn, poses a problem for Mexico’s northern neighbor.

While Bonner said he does not think drug cartel activities pose a substantial national security threat to the U.S. itself, the Mexican government’s battle with the cartels is still of significant concern to the United States.

“It would be untenable [for the U.S.] to have a state on our border that is controlled by narcotraffickers,” he said.

On this side of the border, in 2008, over 40% of American 12th graders had used marijuana at least once, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Bonner said that while he believes cocaine and methamphetamines are ultimately more profitable for the cartels, “it all adds up.”

When young Americans buy even small amounts of marijuana that is trafficked by the cartels, “they’re contributing to criminal organizations that have engaged in and are engaging in wanton violence in Mexico and elsewhere,” Bonner said.

“They’re aiding and abetting.”

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Would legalized pot protect America?

CHICAGO — As Mexico’s descent into the maelstrom of drug-sponsored gang warfare pushes cartel murders and kidnappings into the U.S., a basic policy question lingers:

Would the legalization of marijuana curb Mexican drug violence and enhance U.S. national security?

In a Wednesday afternoon speech, Peter Bensinger, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, dismissed the notion that marijuana legalization would curtail the carnage spurred by Mexican drug cartels. “Legalizing marijuana will not solve this problem,” said Bensinger at a discussion of the Mexican drug war and U.S. security, sponsored by the Chicago-based National Strategy Forum.

But, value-laden judgments aside, it’s hard to imagine how a legalized pot would not deal a blow to the violent capabilities of Mexican gangs.

“The threat will be significantly reduced from an American perspective,” said Juan Carlos Hildago, project coordinator for Latin America with the Washington-based Cato Institute, of the legislative hypothetical.

Mexican cartels make an estimated $25 billion to $30 billion each year off a ravenous U.S. drug demand – nearly 50 percent of which stems from the black-market marijuana trade, Hidalgo said. That windfall has sponsored a violent war, where kidnapping and murder extend into U.S.-Mexico border cities. In Mexico, Bensinger said, federal officials face the abject choice of “lead or silver” – death or money – from deep-pocketed drug lords.

“If marijuana were legalized here in the United States, they will face serious drop in revenue,” Hidalgo said.

While Bensinger said the unmitigated violence among Mexican drug gangs – along with its requisite spillover into the United States – represented “a serious threat to American national security,” he claimed pot legalization would have a negligible affect on cartel operations.

“I don’t think much. No,” he said in a phone interview after his speech, adding that the potency and age regulations that would accompany any legalization law would actually enhance the booming illicit drug market. “You’ll find that people will be offered the relatively less potent pot, and will want a more potent product,” he said.

“That scenario is not backed by any sort of experience in the past,” said Hildago. “When alcohol was re-legalized here in the United States, most of the mobsters went out of business.”

The U.S. government has committed extensive resources to fight the epidemic of cartel violence. In March 2009, the Obama administration added $700 million to the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion counterdrug security agreement between the two countries signed by former President George W. Bush.

But the initiative, according to a paper by Dr. Hal Brands of the Strategic Studies Institute, “suffers from a basic lack of balance,” with primary emphasis on internal security, enforcement and interdiction – what Brands characterized as a myopic “supply-side approach.”

Bensinger, too, highlighted the need for a holistic strategy to combat the cartels, including changing the geographic shortcoming of Mexican prosecutor deployment, which is centralized in Mexico City, and addressing U.S. demand. “It’s our appetite for this product that’s driving the violence,” he said.

In January, a former Mexican foreign minister called for the drug’s legalization in an effort to break the cartels, CNN reported.

Legalization would certainly not dissolve the cartels, Hidalgo said, and opportunities would remain in the heroin and methamphetamine trade. Neither would recourse to violence be stamped out. “These are organizations that are highly cannibalistic,” he said. “We might see more violence.”

But from a U.S. security perspective, the threat would be subjugated. “The capability to buy guns and weaponry will be reduced dramatically,” Hidalgo said.

The prospect for legalization, however, is unlikely. “Marijuana legalization, for any purpose, remains a non-starter in the Obama Administration,” stated R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an October letter. “It isn’t even on the agenda.”

Tagged , ,